SAVE Act voter ID bill on Trump’s and Congress’ minds: What to know

The rapper Nicki Minaj supports it. Elon Musk says it’s critical to sustain American democracy. The SAVE America Act voter identification bill emerged this week as a hot topic in hard-line Republican circles and now may advance in Congress next week.

The legislation, backed by President Donald Trump, is scheduled for a vote in the House of Representatives next week amid a pressure campaign from right-wing commentators and many in the congressional GOP. It sets up a showdown with Democrats and voting-rights advocates, who say such a proposal could disenfranchise millions of Americans, and with Senate Republican leaders, who are fielding calls to change the filibuster and clear a path to passage.

“America’s Elections are Rigged, Stolen, and a Laughingstock all over the World. We are either going to fix them, or we won’t have a Country any longer,” Trump posted to Truth Social on Thursday. The president urged passage of a bill dubbed the SAVE America Act, which would require government-issued photo ID to cast a ballot and proof of citizenship to register to vote.

Democrats are among those who have bristled at the proposals, which are rooted in Trump’s unfounded claims that elections are rife with fraud and come in the context of the president’s recent comments about nationalizing elections and the FBI raid of a Georgia election office last week where Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was present.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said this week that the voter ID proposal would be “dead on arrival” in the Senate and likened the bill — introduced by Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, in the House and Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, in the Senate — to “Jim Crow 2.0.”

According to the Brennan Center for Justice and the University of Maryland’s Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement, 21 million Americans do not have documents proving their citizenship readily available and 2.6 million Americans lack government-issued photo ID of any kind. Low-income and minority voters are more likely to lack the types of documents that would be required by a national voter ID law, leading to less voting participation by those groups.

“The documentary proof of citizenship provisions would be extremely burdensome for a lot of Americans. Most Americans don’t have a driver’s license or ID that indicates that they’re a U.S. citizen,” Nicole Hansen, policy counsel at the Campaign Legal Center, said in an interview.

“We really view the bill as part of a broader effort by the president and his allies in Congress to sow the seeds to question election results in 2026 that they don’t like,” Hansen said.

The general concept of voter ID requirements has broad public support, with voting-rights advocates cautioning the devil is in the details. According…